Preclinical Macaque Models of Viral Diseases

About this Research Topic

Background

Viral diseases represent some of the most critical challenges to human health and longevity. Despite great progress and over 40 years of research, HIV/AIDS continues to present global health challenges. These include HIV-dependent immune dysfunction, coinfections, and sequelae associated with failure to clear these infections. Notably, chronic or persistent viral infections can predispose to other conditions such as neurological disorders, cancer or multiple sclerosis. The recent COVID-19 pandemic, with over 450 million cases and over 6 million deaths worldwide, shows the importance of new and emerging diseases as well as the potential for coinfections. Collectively, limitations in the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases exacerbate the already significant risks that globalization and a highly connected global population present. Global climate change is also increasing the risk of the spread of diseases once confined to the tropics, as vectors expand in numbers and distribution.

As some of our closest living relatives, macaques offer unique opportunities to study viral diseases in highly controlled settings and allow for the interrogation of critical aspects of the virus-host interaction in an outbred model with a highly characterized immune system. Macaque models have been some of the most informative and predictive translational models of viral diseases. For example, macaque models of HIV/AIDS have helped to guide clinical trials on a number of fronts including prophylaxis (e.g., vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, antivirals) and cure through the characterization of viral reservoirs, the biology and reversal of viral latency, and immunotherapies. Recently, models of SARS-CoV-2 have also proved highly informative in understanding transmission, pathogenesis, vaccine efficacy and therapeutic interventions. Progress is being made in a number of other viral diseases including Zika, Ebola, Dengue, Chikungunya virus infections and several herpes virus infection models, with new models under evaluation for current and emerging viral diseases. Macaque models offer the ability to sample tissues and evaluate virus-host interactions at key portals of entry, dissemination kinetics at known timepoints post exposure, and interactions at key sites using highly controlled parameters, including viral dose, route, MHC type, etc. These key attributes offer the potential to evaluate preventive and therapeutic interventions in a highly controlled fashion, which can be combined with barcoded viruses, imaging and/or serial sampling to answer questions that would otherwise be impossible to address. These unique characteristics make for highly informative preclinical models.

This Research Topic will focus on Original Research and Review articles highlighting a number of important aspects of macaque models of viral disease. Topic areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Use of macaque models to evaluate key aspects of virus-host interactions
• Evaluation of prophylactic or therapeutic interventions using these models
• Advances in macaque models of viral diseases, including advanced sampling, imaging, immunotherapies, and other techniques that improve the ability to address key questions in these models
• Novel macaque models of viral diseases including characterizing and employing new viruses, barcoded viruses, labeled viruses for targeted imaging, and coinfections
• Use of macaque models to evaluate comorbidities, impacts of microbiome, endemic infections, or other factors that could be informative in human populations
• Impact of host factors such as stress, housing, SPF status, immune phenotype, etc. that could improve rigor and reproducibility in macaque models

Keywords: Macaque, Alphavirus, Coronavirus, Influenza, HIV, viral, model

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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